After I Dream

by Lee, Rachel

  This time the sea had helped save her loved ones.

  Except Chase. She was scared to death about him, wondering if he was all right, if he would be all right. But she didn’t blame the sea for what had happened to him. She blamed the men who had wanted to kill them.

  The waves were rolling in gently, barely ripples in the smooth surface of the water, and she listened to the gentle lapping, feeling as if the sea were singing a soft lullaby. Mother Ocean. At least she’d made peace with that fear.

  “I told you I’d be all right.”

  The sound of Chase’s voice right behind her caused her to leap to her feet and turn around. He was silhouetted against the blazing sunset, and he opened his arms to her. She flew to him, felt him lift her right off her feet and into a world where everything was right.

  He kissed her hungrily, holding on to her as if he wanted never to let her go.

  “Oh, God, I was so worried,” she gasped when he let her breathe again. “I was so scared…”

  “I’m fine. I’m fine.” He set her on her feet, and his fingers traced the contour of her cheek. “I was almost over it by the time I got to the hospital. They decompressed me for only a short time. I’ll have to take it easy for a few days…”

  She wrapped her arms around his waist, hugging him close, burying her face in his shoulder and inhaling deeply of his scent. He was real. He was there. “Thank God. Thank God.”

  He stroked her hair and back, dropped a kiss on the crown of her head. “That was some song and dance you were giving those guys on the boat, arguing with them about how they should kill you.”

  A choked laugh escaped her. “It was the only way I could think to keep them off-balance. I had to buy time.”

  “You did a damn fine job of it.”

  She tipped her head back and looked up at him. “You’re really okay?”

  “Right as rain. What about you?”

  “I’m perfect. Now that you’re back.”

  The evening suddenly hushed. The waves grew still, the breeze stopped, and Callie had the feeling that the whole world was holding its breath.

  Chase cupped her face in his hands and looked down into her eyes. In the failing light, his eyes were dark and mysterious… like the depths of the ocean. “I love you, Calypso.”

  She caught her breath, and felt her heart leap. “I… love you, too.”

  “Will you marry me?”

  She could hardly believe her ears. “Marry you?” The words came out in a squeak.

  “Marry me,” he repeated. “I figure between us we can keep Jeff out of any serious trouble.”

  Her heart began to tumble. “You want to marry me to keep Jeff out of trouble.”

  He started to laugh, throwing back his head and letting the sound rise to the blazing tropical sky. “Not hardly,” he said finally. “Not hardly. I want you to marry me because my life would be empty without you. I figured that out today.”

  Then before she could question him further, or take umbrage, he lifted her off her feet and whirled her in a circle. “Marry me because I love you, Calypso. Because I love you.”

  It was the best reason in the world. They stood wrapped in each other’s arms for a long time, watching the sun disappear into the sea, watching the burst of crimson and orange that came a few minutes later. Making plans for their future, Chase talked of starting a business, of making room in it for Jeff. He spoke of building a new life for them, and he spoke of the sea.

  “Can you live with it, Calypso? I’ll leave the sea if you really want me to, but…” He shook his head slowly, unable to express the loss that would mean to him.

  But she didn’t need him to express it because she understood what it meant to him. And she understood that taking him away from the sea would be cutting out some essential part of him. She loved him too much to do that.

  “I can live with it,” she told him, and looked out over the water, letting peace replace that last of her fear.

  “It’s over,” Chase said finally. “The bad dream is over.”

  Callie nodded. She, too, felt as if she were waking from a terrible dream.

  And stepping into a bright new one.

  More

  Rachel Lee!

  Please turn this page

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  excerpt from

  her new novel,

  WHEN I WAKE,

  available in paperback

  November 2000.

  “Why don’t you put in your hearing aids?” Orin asked his daughter.

  Veronica didn’t hear him, and he didn’t want to shout. So, finally, he picked up the waterproof case she’d bought to store them in for this trip and carried them to her.

  Her gaze slipped from the window of the cottage they were renting down to the case he held out toward her. She shook her head and looked up in time to read his lips.

  “Why not?”

  “Because I hate them,” she said. She could hear her own voice, barely. It was distant, unformed, and she had to trust that her lips and tongue were doing the right things from memory.

  “They help,” he said. “I want to talk.”

  Reluctantly, she reached for the case and opened it. Inside were the reminders of her disability, and she looked at them with a hatred beyond words. Then, irritably, she snatched them up and inserted them into her ears. Drawing a quick breath, she listened. They were adjusted right.

  And now every sound was annoyingly loud, including the grinding roar of the air conditioner and the hum of the refrigerator in the kitchenette.

  “Thank you,” Orin said.

  To Veronica it sounded like “aaaaa ooooo.” She had to watch his lips to identify the consonant sounds she could no longer hear at all.

  “I don’t understand,” he said, “why you hate them so much, Veronica. They help you hear.”

  “They help me hear everything, Dad. Everything. Right now I can barely hear you over the roar of the air conditioner.” Could barely distinguish his words from the invasion of other sounds.

  He nodded, but she guessed he would never really understand. Would never understand that the amplified noise in her ears was every bit as bad as the silence she experienced without her hearing aids. Would never understand that for her there was no good solution, there was only bad and worse, depending on the situation.

  “What did you want to talk about?”

  “This search.” He had learned to keep his sentences relatively short to make it easier for her to follow him.”

  “What about it?”

  “We’re probably not going to find the vessel. Not in three months.”

  She shrugged and wished she could turn her attention back to the window. Watching the top of a palm turn into a dark shadow against the red smudge of the sunset sky interested her more than this conversation. But she no longer had the luxury of looking at something else while she listened to someone speak.

  “Gallagher,” her father said, “was right. You might spend your entire life and fortune searching and never find a thing.”

  “I know that.” But it wasn’t going to stop her. She had nothing else to live for anymore, except vindicating her mother’s quest. She had lost everything else that had mattered to her. Everything.

  “Veronica…”

  “Look, Dad, we’ve been all over this. If you didn’t want me to do this, then why the hell did you tell me about the mask and Mother?”

  She must have been speaking even more loudly than usual, to judge by the way he pulled back.

  He shook his head. “I told you because I wanted you to have something to live for.”

  “Well, now I do. It’s all I have. So let me do it.”

  “I don’t want you to be disappointed.”

  As if anything could ever disappoint her the way Larry had disappointed her. She laughed bitterly and turned her back on her father, effectively ending her conversation with him. If he said anything now, she would hear vowels. Just vowels. Unintelligible. If she could even hear him over
the roar of the air conditioner.

  She was angry with him, and had been ever since he’d told her about the mask. Her mother had died when she was five, and Veronica had grown up with a great big hole in her life. Discovering that her father had concealed her mother’s obsession with the mask from her had infuriated her because it was such an important part of her mother’s life. For twenty-five years he’d painted her mother in a light that was not her mother at all. She felt betrayed and cheated. Even more, she felt he had betrayed her mother, by hiding an essential part of her as if it were something of which he was ashamed.

  Worse, she was angry at herself for being angry with her father. It seemed so wrong to be unable to forgive him when he was so close to death. Yet she couldn’t find it in herself to do so. Not after he had steadfastly lied to her all those years.

  Sometimes, merely looking at him filled her with an almost uncontainable rage… and the rage was always followed by self-loathing.

  He touched her arm, causing her to jump, forcing her to look at him.

  “Veronica, please. You need to know. Just sit down and listen to me, please.”

  She battled down her anger, burying it under the cold lump of lead in her heart, and sat in the chair by the window. It wasn’t a very comfortable chair, but she didn’t care about that. She felt tense, irritated, ready to fly or fight. Over what? The fact that her father wanted to caution her? For every bit of help he’d given her with research over the past months, he’d also given her warnings. She continuously felt as if he were urging her forward with one hand and holding her back with the other.

  He took the other chair and faced her, taking her hands in his. The rumble of the air conditioner drowned out his first words, and she had to ask him to repeat himself. She hated that. God, how she hated that. She hated every single reminder of her disability.

  “You need to be careful,” he said more clearly. He’d said it a thousand times since she’d undertaken this quest, but he’d never told her why. She was getting sick of the warnings without explanations.

  “Why?” she demanded. “You keep saying that, but you never say why.”

  “Because sunken treasure is valuable,” he said. “Men will do anything for gold. Because… because…”

  She watched him look away, unsure if he’d said any more than that, if his words had been lost when he turned his head. Before she could ask, he faced her again.

  “Honey,” he said, “your mother died under suspicious circumstances.”

  “She fell off a boat and drowned!”

  “Your mother could swim like a dolphin.”

  “She hit her head.”

  “Maybe. That’s what the coroner thought. I’m not so sure.” His face tightened, and his eyes darkened. “Just be careful. The artifact’s value is greater than gold.”

  Indeed it was. Far greater. Because so few of the artworks of the native American cultures had survived the Spanish plunder. So much had been melted down into gold bars for transport back to Spain, so much had been turned into coinage used to pay the armies of conquest. Very little of the beauty remained. But the mask was even more important because if it were found, it would be the only surviving artifact from a lost culture, a people whose passing had left almost nothing of archaeological value, a people whose culture was known only as a few footnotes in the journal of Mesoamerican conquests. A people without a name.

  Veronica was not about to be deterred by vague warnings. “I’ll be safe, Dad. How could I be anything but? It’s kind of hard to sneak up on a boat on the open sea.”

  “People don’t have to sneak up at sea, Veronica. They come as bold as they please, because there’s going to be no one around to protect you.”

  She shrugged and looked away, letting him know she didn’t want to discuss this anymore.

  So he changed the subject, which forced her to look at him again. “What did you think of him?”

  “Of whom?” she asked, having missed the first part of what he said.

  “Gallagher.”

  “Him. Oh.” What did she think of him? She let her gaze wander back to the window, but found the night had grown dark, and all she could see was her own reflection in the glass. “I don’t know. Drew was sure about him.”

  He touched her hand again, drawing her attention back to him. “Drew’s a fairly good judge of character. How did he know Gallagher, anyway?”

  “They went to Harvard together.”

  Both of Orin’s bald eyebrows raised. “Harvard? Gallagher’s a Harvard man?”

  She nodded. She was getting tired from the effort of talking with her father, tired from the battery of noises coming through her hearing aids. “MBA, apparently.”

  Orin said something and shook his head, but she was through listening. Pulling out her hearing aids, she put them back in the container, letting him know that she was done conversing for the evening.

  There was one advantage to being deaf, she thought bitterly, even as her own petulance bothered her. She could bail out of a conversation in an instant, and nobody could force her to listen.

  But she couldn’t silence her own thoughts. Her father’s question, What did she think of Dugan Gallagher, followed her into the quiet.

  What did she think of him? She hadn’t been particularly impressed to find him lazing back in his chair with his feet up on the desk on a business day. On the other hand, she had colleagues who assumed exactly that pose when they were thinking, so maybe she shouldn’t hold it against him.

  She hadn’t liked his lack of manners, though, and she found the cluttered mess of his office distasteful. Bottom line, she hadn’t really been impressed with him, and was less impressed by the thought that someone with a Harvard MBA was wasting himself on a small diving business.

  But her friend Drew Hunnecutt, an oceanographer whose idea of a holiday was to dive the reefs off the Florida Keys, had recommended him highly “His barrel may be a little bent,” Drew had said, “but he’s a straight shooter.”

  And a straight shooter was exactly what she needed. She needed someone she could count on to tell her the truth, because there was so much she didn’t know about this whole treasure-hunting business that she could get into serious trouble. She needed someone she could rely on not to steal or conceal their finds. If they made any.

  Drew had been a great help to her, studying the ocean currents in the area where Nuestra Senora de Alcantara had probably gone down, and had done some extensive computer modeling of how the wreck might have drifted over nearly three hundred years. He’d targeted a relatively small area of seafloor out toward the Marquesas as the likeliest place for a discovery.

  She knew perfectly well his models could be all wrong. She knew she might never find a thing, not even some ballast. She was willing to live with that. What she wasn’t willing to live with was never having tried.

  As for Gallagher… she could control him. After all, she was paying for him, his boat and his time. Besides, she trusted Drew, and if Drew thought she could rely on Gallagher, she probably could.

  But she had no doubt that it was going to be a bumpy ride.

  Night was settling over the mountains of Colombia. Emilio Zaragosa sat on his patio, awaiting his dinner, and watched his garden turn into shadows and shades of gray. In a little while his wife would call to him, and he would join her in a repast fit for a king.

  Emilio lived well. He had grown up the hard way on the streets of Baranquilla, in the gutters basically. Hungry, half-naked, and unwanted, he had learned life’s lessons well. He had learned that if he wanted something, he had to take it. He had learned that the only thing he could rely on was his wits. He had learned a man could never be too wealthy.

  And he had learned that it was a man’s responsibility to provide for his family. These days, Emilio Zaragosa had family. A great deal of family. He had six daughters and two sons, four of them married now, and seven grandchildren. If Emilio had anything to say about it, not a single one of them would ever go hungry as
he had.

  So now he was in his fifties, a proud man with the fortune of Croesus, all of it made by dealing in antiquities from all over the world. He had a good business in producing fake artifacts that tourists loved to buy all over Spanish-speaking America, but he also had a healthy and very illegal trade in the priceless relics of ancient civilizations.

  Wealthy men were acquisitive, he had discovered, and had a particular taste for forbidden things. He was more than willing to pander to their tastes because they were more than willing to pay generously for their pleasures.

  But he had developed a certain acquisitiveness himself over the years. Maybe because he didn’t entirely trust currencies, stocks, or bonds. But the value of ancient artifacts never fell, and as they became increasingly difficult for private hands to obtain, they became increasingly priceless. So he had a collection of his own, a hedge against the ills that could befall a man who put all his eggs in one basket. A hedge against years in which he might not find some new artifact to market.

  His caution did well by him. He could have retired at any time and still been sure his children and grandchildren would have been well provided for. But that was not his way. The memory of hunger dogged his heels like a ravening wolf.

  So when he heard that a Tampa archaeologist was searching for the lost mask of the Storm Mother, he put his ear to the ground, so to speak. He’d heard of the mask once before in his early days, a rumble on his network of informants. A Tampa archaeologist had been looking for it then, too, and a great many acquisitive people had been bidding for it even though it was unlikely to be found.

  But all the furor had interested Emilio in the mask, and he’d looked into what little he could learn about it. And what he had learned had whetted his appetite considerably. How rare indeed it would be to have the sole surviving artifact of an extinct culture. A golden artifact.

  He had never been able to learn where the mask might be found, and the Tampa archaeologist had died right about the time Emilio had gotten interested. But now someone else was searching, and Emilio was never one to overlook a possibility.